Paid Internet Advertising is a great way to pull more traffic to your business website and ultimately draw in more leads. However, it can be very expensive and requires things like analysis and landing pages. Therefore, you need to make sure you always get the biggest bang from your paid ad dollars. You do this with a number of tactics starting with using keyword strategies that work for your campaign.
I was recently speaking to business owners in using another SEO Agency in Longmont Colorado. Their budget had recently increased and they were throwing a lot of money at Google Adwords campaigns. While they were getting a lot of traffic and leads, many of the leads were not relative to their business. They had approached their Adwords advertising too broadly and had failed to target their key market. Having said this, you need to know how you can absolutely ensure you are leveraging Adwords to the highest potential to get the biggest bang for your buck.
This article includes some basics and best practices. They will also serve as a guideline to know if you are dealing with a Local SEO Agency that s proficient and experienced. If they are not following most of the practices in this article then buyer beware and if an agency is promising quick results, be prepared to spend for their claim. Adwords can be like a new gold rush for your business. However, like gold mining, you have to spend a little more time prospecting to know where to dig.
Keyword Strategies That Work
You should, first of all, understand Long Tail Keywords. These are keywords that are more specific and in the format of longer phrases. Most SEO agencies fail to consider long term keywords and therefore end up spending more than is needed in their advertising activities. They end up targeting main or head keywords that have higher traffic volumes and therefore have higher competition and cost. The adage that you are not necessarily looking for the keywords with the highest traffic but instead you are looking for keywords that customers are looking for you.
First, let’s learn how to identify these longer and maybe even less popular long-tail keywords. You can use Google Keyword research tool but they will give you head keywords not long-tail keywords. One very valuable place to look is on a Google search result/ At the bottom of the page under the section that says “Searches Related To”.
These aren’t necessarily the highest volume traffic keywords but they are related terms of what people are using. After all, you should be using the words customers would use to find you.
In this example search, the keyword term “SEO Agency” is a head keyword. This simply means people search for it very frequently. The much less popular term “SEO agency meaning” may receive a lot fewer searches, however, it exemplifies a long tail keyword that may be a lot less costly.
Many first-time pays per click advertisers make a huge mistake in selecting the wrong keywords. It is not that they are the wrong keywords as much as they are wrong for you. If you have a huge spend to capitalize on the top keywords, then, by all means, you can buy out all the head keywords like “SEO Agency”. However, you will end up spending a ton of money and forget about ROI. Now consider targeting a larger quantity terms that have lower traffic versus a few high traffic keywords. Common Places For Paid Internet Advertising
Google AdWords – AdWords is the most known and obvious choice for most businesses Paid Internet Advertising campaigns. Google offers display and text ads as well as other ad types. AdWords is typically the choice for most company’s campaigns because of the sheer search volume. However, Adwords ads produce higher ROI’s the longer you use it. That is right, Google rewards longer-term customers with higher better quality scores and thus you will get more results for less money over time.
Bing and Yahoo – Bing or Microsoft now owns Yahoo so ads are submitted through Bing. Bing Ads is much like Google Ads, in fact, you can create your ads in Google and Import them directly into Bing Ads. In some cases, while Bing and Yahoo have less traffic than Google, advertisers may realize a higher overall ROI. This may be because keywords are cheaper in many cases and more head keywords can be targeted.
Facebook and LinkedIn – Social ads have increased over the last couple of years. Social media ads combine text and display ads somewhat like Google for paid internet advertising. However, they are highly targeted based on user interests, demographics, and location. Facebook and LinkedIn are great options to consider as many marketers overlook these options.
StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon is a social media network that offers unique paid advertising options. It is inexpensive and it also can guarantee some kind of a click-through. You should check this option out but make sure you check your real conversions. This will be the biggest weakness of their model.
BuySellAds and Direct Buy – BuySellAds.com is great for additional display ads. They basically let you sort of rent space on a website or on a blog for a fixed fee. You can also go direct and contact bloggers directly to rent space on their blog.
It is key to your strategy to try several of these options. Once you have use what worked to make decisions about where to spend your ad money. Sometimes advertisers guess which is best without putting effort into doing any research. Guesses will break you and data will tell you what gave the best result.
Tracking Needs to Be Used To Measure Successes
You need to ensure you have tracking capabilities to make this doable and productive. You should never buy paid ads if you cannot track results. However, Google Analytics is a great platform and a must when analyzing your ad buying. The Analytics package is free and very easy to install.
Use Custom Landing Pages
Landing pages are important as your paid internet advertising efforts by having incoming visitors sent to a unique page on your website. You do not want to use your homepage which may seem less than intuitive. However, there are a few good reasons for using landing pages. First of all, landing pages allow for customized messaging you’re your websites, incoming visitors. What this does is allow you to continue with consistency to extend your ad messaging to create a more cohesive experience.
In addition, landing pages let you focus and push visitors toward specific actions you want them to take such as download something or fill out a form. Ultimately, they help to make tracking your website visits easier which is especially important.
You may be able to create and use a single landing page for an entire campaign. However, you may also find it more beneficial to have specific landing pages for the main keywords.
You should block custom landing pages from search engine results. You can do this by editing your “robots.txt” file. This is very important and will help make your tracking reliable. If Google and Bing push organic visitors to your custom landing pages that could give false results regarding how the page is performing.
Use A Strong Call to Action
You know you have spent the time needed on your paid internet advertising and you’re targeted on keyword strategies that work. Now you need a strong call to action that will identify and focus your customers to do what you want them to do. This is how you convert visitors on your landing page into a lead or a customer. Any page you send them to should have a clear action. This is ultra important as it means the difference between a sale or leads and wasting your money on ads. Essentially, everything on your landing page should push website visitors to your predefined action.
Review Results, But Maybe Not Every day
It is like anything else, you must be patient. Looking at your results too often can trigger you to act too hastily. The analytical review requires more data that a day or two. You must accumulate data so trends are accurate and information is more reliable. You should determine the time period you are going to stick to for changing your ads or landing page. It can be monthly or weekly but not more often than weekly.
You should also track statistics in spreadsheets because it is easier to pick up on trends. Once you see trends it is easier to formulate what you’re seeing into a plan.
Go Long and If You Are In It To Win It
If you expect to be finished with managing your paid internet advertising campaign within a couple of weeks, you are doomed to fail. To get great results, you have to give your campaign time and work your plan. Once you have a keyword strategy that works, the trends and information you collect and analyze will provide the clues you need to alter course. Therefore, you should consider dedicating your time and money from the start to observation and tweaking. When your ads are optimized then you can go all in but always measure as the thing will change over time. Paid Internet Advertising Can Work For You If You Work For It!
